"Opera Software today permanently removed the ad banner and licensing fee from its award-winning Web browser. The ad-free, full-featured Opera browser is now available for download, completely free of charge, here." This news got submitted a staggering 14 times, and as far as I know, that's a record.

Opera is notably the fatest browser on all platforms I have tested it under- Windows, Mac and Linux.

I must admit that I have experienced some minor stability issues on non-Windows platforms- I have noted that Opera is most stable on Windows. For me it crashes roughly once per day (heavy browsing). However, an Opera crash is not a problem at all- it auto saves your browsing session and re-opens all your pages you had opened before the crash occured.